The Wishing Garden (25 page)

The rain was streaming off his cheeks and chin. “I did it for you,” he cried, but even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. He’d done it for himself, so he could go on believing in justice and God, so he could go on.

“Mom, please.” He laid his head against the door and cried. He pounded his forehead against it, but she never unbolted the door. She never let him in.

Finally, he went back to his car and slept in the backseat. In the morning, she would let him in. But in the morning, her car was gone, and there was a note on the front door that read:
Get your things and go
.

He did not get his things. He drove to Joanne’s and held out his bloody hand. She took one look at it and his tear-stained face, and pulled him into her arms.

“My god, what happened?”

She led him into the kitchen and forced him to sit down while she bandaged his hand. Finally, he leaned his head against her breast and left it there.

“Whatever it is,” she said, “we’ll get through it.”

And then he told her. He told the whole tale, even when he felt her stiffen. Even when she jerked his head off her. When he got to the part where he pushed Roy into the water, she was standing clear across the room.

“Oh, Jake. You’ve gone and ruined everything.”

He stood up slowly. “I love you,” he said, and it was the last time he would say it to anyone. From then on, the words would sit in the bottom of his stomach, like inhaled lake water, and make him ill.

“This will hang over you for the rest of your life,” she went on. “Even if they don’t find the body right away, you’ll always worry. There will always be the threat of being found out. You think I deserve a life like that? Waiting for some awful bomb to drop? What about the children we might have had? What would I tell them when their father is carted off for murder?”

Her voice grew more and more hysterical. “God, Jake, you’ve ruined it. We could have had everything. And now there’s only this.” She gestured at his bandaged hand. “This … stamp of what you’ve done. Why didn’t you just go to the police? Why did you have to be a fucking hero? Why …”

He walked out before she could finish. He drove to ASU, then right past it. He turned northwest and kept driving. He dumped Roy’s suitcase in a trash can outside Mayer. He didn’t stop until he smelled pine.

It never occurred to him to go back to school and pretend nothing had happened. Something had happened, all right. He’d proven out his theory: It was an unjust world. The people you loved could turn on you in an instant.

Now, Savannah lay beside him, her tears soaking his shirt. He tensed, waiting for her to leave. He wanted her to prove the world was the enemy, that he’d been right hiding away all these years. But all she did was cry as he should have but had never been able to.

She took his chin in her hand and turned him toward her, and then he was lost. She was all he wanted. She kissed him softly and his aching heart ached more. Sometime during that kiss, with some kind of magic trick, she plucked a tear from the corner of his eye, and then another. One sleight of hand and he was crying for all he was worth. A few soft words and he got his forgiveness, whether he deserved it or not.

 E
LEVEN
 T
HE
K
NIGHT OF
C
UPS
A
TTRACTION
 

D
og left the light on at night now. He was not afraid of the dark, but of waking up in the morning surprised by vomit on his pillow, or a bit of blood on his collar. He liked to be prepared for things, that was all, the way he prepared for May frosts with a coating of shredded straw and waterwheels for his tomatoes. He left the light on so that, if there was blood, he could find it before Maggie did. While she slept, he soaked all his stains in cold water to keep them from setting.

Besides, he hardly slept at all now. This spring, the top branch of the mountain laurel had reached his bedroom window, and the hours from two
A.M
. to six found him in the chair by the window, breathing in the apple-like scent of the blossoms and writing love poems.

He had not expected to start writing again. What did he have to write about except that he could no
longer get rid of chills? They lasted for days and left him rickety. They were like long, slow earthquakes that appeared to do no damage until he looked under the house and found the foundation gone.

He sat in his chair now, shivering. He would have given everything he had just to walk down the stairs and make his wife breakfast. French toast sprinkled with cinnamon, thick-sliced bacon and cantaloupe. He would have given anything for the look on her face when he started taking care of her.

Maggie, though, did not want breakfast in bed; she wanted to know what he was feeling. But even if he’d had the words, he wouldn’t have been able to tell her. He was nearly mute with exhaustion; his breath no longer reached his lungs, and asking him to say more than a few words at a time was like asking him to stop being melodramatic and just get well already.

So instead he took up pen and paper and tried to write of how he sometimes felt death in bed beside him, a cold black mass in the spoon position, its knees tucked up against the back of his calves. He tried to write of the pain that rocked his bones, no doubt causing bruises in his marrow, how his teeth ached and the high-pitched ringing in his ears seemed like a scream coming from the heart of the tumor. He tried to write that his bladder burned, but he couldn’t relieve it, because it hurt even more to urinate, and that a shower just about killed him. It chilled him right to the bone. He tried to write that he was furious; he ought to be able to lie beside his wife at night without his odd-smelling sweat offending her, without her reaching for him, then pulling away when she touched the sharp bone of his hip. He tried to write that every time he looked on a healthy man he thought God a traitor, but all that came out were love poems. Tonight’s went like this:

He couldn’t help it, and he’d stopped trying. He just wasn’t made for melancholy or deep philosophical debate. He’d been made to write sappy poems and to love a complex woman, and that was enough for him.

He tucked the poem into his pocket, then curled his hands around the arms of the chair. He checked that Maggie was still sleeping, because there was no need for her to see what he had to go through to stand. He slid to his knees, then rested his head on the chair seat until his arms stopped shaking. He pressed his elbows into the seat, gritted his teeth, then slowly hoisted himself to his feet.

The blanket dropped from his shoulders, and his shale-like skin prickled. The cold hurt, but then, so did everything. He worked his way around the chair arm to the wall, then along the wall to the door, always gripping something, steadying himself on tables and lamps, like a thirteen-month-old desperate to walk.

There were sixteen steps down to the kitchen, and tonight he had to slide down them on his rear like a child. After he’d done it, he opened the back door to his personally planted heaven. The first scent to hit him was the syrupy aroma of the honeysuckle, then the blue bite of sage, then at long last the jasmine. There was nothing sweeter in this world than jasmine tangled up in a warm summer’s night. It was the only
thing that got rid of the chills; it was like being enveloped by a soft, fleshy woman.

He stepped out into the garden and saw where Maggie had replaced a withering, rare purple salvia with the more common blue variety. She had done her best to prune it to form, to cover up all signs of her work, but he could still make out her handprints in the soil. He knelt down and put his hands where hers had been. He was the only person on this planet who knew what she went through to keep things around here living, and he was glad. Marriage was not only a vow; it was also a privilege. The right to see what no one else could see—both the tender and the ugly, the many faces of a woman who did all her wooing in secret.

He stood up slowly. It took another fifteen minutes to work his way to the partially carved bench beneath one of the Juneberry trees. He sat down and leaned against Jake’s carvings. He had already decided on the next one. A vegetable patch, with carrots and potatoes pushing their way out of the desert soil no one else had had the nerve to plant in. He had never been in a fistfight in his life, but he’d planted peas in Phoenix. He’d grown all his daylilies from seed. That ought to count for something.

He steadied himself on the arms of the bench, then climbed up on his knees. Ten minutes later, he got to his shrunken, pale feet and clung to the lowest branch of the Juneberry tree. This time, he wanted to spear the poem on the topmost branch. He wanted it to touch the heavens awhile before he coaxed Maggie into looking up.

He wrapped his arm around the branch, then tried to hoist himself up. He didn’t even get close. His arm gave, his foot slid out, and just as he was falling, large hands encircled his waist and planted him back on the ground.

Doug turned around to find Jake Grey. “You should be in the hospital,” Doug said.

“I broke out. Anyway, I could say the same for you.”

They looked at each other, then Doug laughed. “Look at us. Some kind of men.”

Jake stepped back and ran a hand over his beard. He glanced at the garage apartment, where men frailer than Doug had been pacing for the last three days, waiting for Savannah to take a break from the hospital and Jake, to read their fortunes.

“You all right?” Doug asked.

“Sure,” Jake said, though his face was pale, and his left hand fluttered every now and then.

“You up for climbing?” He handed Jake the note. “I want to spear it through the top branch.”

Jake glanced at the poem, then tucked it in his pocket.

“You can read it, son,” Doug said.

But Jake didn’t. He grabbed the same branch Doug had been hanging on and hoisted himself up. He hovered atop the strong limb for a moment, breathing hard, but Doug didn’t worry about his heart. Tough men died young, but not while they were wrapped up in a woman, not when they were waking up wanting something for the first time in their lives.

Jake climbed to the top branch and speared the poem through the limb. By the time he got back down, Doug was sitting on the bench again, his shoulder curled along the rim of Superstition Mountain.

“Your daughter,” Jake said, but Doug held up his hand.

“You don’t have to ask my permission. I’ll tell you, though, she’ll make it impossible for you to be miserable. You’ll wake up one morning not even knowing yourself.”

The night wind swirled, slapping them with lily petals and lime-green gingko leaves, but when Doug looked up, the poem was still there.

“Why don’t you come up to the cabin for a while?” Jake said suddenly. “All of you. The fresh air will do you good. We can finish the bench in peace.”

Doug looked at him, and it was the strangest thing. It was like seeing himself in those blue eyes. His dark twin, twenty years younger.

“I’m no bed and breakfast,” Jake went on. “Everyone cooks their own food, makes their own beds. The cabin’s small, but it’s got a loft. There’s no one for miles, and the water out of my well is clean as rain.”

Doug tried to hoist himself to his feet, but he was bone tired. Jake helped him with an unsteady hand, another damaged body to lean against. Doug knew how hard it had been for Jake to offer, as hard as giving away a piece of his own soul. “I’d like that,” he said. “Very much.”

The next evening, Maggie listened to Doug poke at the sheets. usually, he lay still as stone, trying to get her to believe he was sleeping. Well, mister, she was down to two hours sleep a night herself. She could fake steady breathing as well as he could.

Finally, she stood up and yanked up the shades, filling the room with dusky light, soft and purple, like Doug’s swollen veins. “All right. Out with it.”